Navigate:

Union troops arrest John Merryman for treason, May 25, 1861

On this day in 1861, in the second month of the Civil War, Union troops arrested John Merryman, a Maryland state legislator. He was indicted for treason and confined at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, charged with seeking to hinder U.S. troop movements from Baltimore to Washington, which was threatened by Confederate forces.

Merryman, who was also lieutenant in the Baltimore County Horse Guards, was accused of recruiting and training soldiers for the Confederate Army and of helping to cut telegraph wires and burn railroad bridges. His attorney sought a writ of habeas corpus to enable a federal judge to weigh the charges. President Abraham Lincoln, however, immediately suspended the right, and George Cadwalader, the general in command of Fort McHenry, acting on Lincoln’s orders, disregarded the petition.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Habeas corpus, derived from the Latin “produce the body,” requires a prisoner to be brought before a judge in a timely manner. It appears in Article One, Section Nine of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.”

Roger Taney, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that the authority to suspend habeas corpus lay solely with Congress. He declared Lincoln’s suspension order to be unconstitutional and cited Cadwalader for contempt. At the time, Taney, a partisan Democrat from Maryland, was sitting as a federal circuit court judge.

If a writ of habeas corpus can be “disregarded and suspended,” by “force of arms,” Taney wrote, then “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws, but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.”